How to Target Music Event-Goers with Facebook Ads

Posted on

February 19, 2019

As an event marketer your main interest is to get your advertising game the most effective, to find the people who are not only interested in your event but who want to take part and pay for it. To find a highly optimized way to deliver your ads and get outstanding results that translates into factual numbers you need to find the perfect target audience.

The conventional Facebook Ads audience targeting

The first step in the process to understand who your audience is. Different types of events will attract very different attendees. A rock concert venue will probably not look for the same demographics as a psytrans festival. Even within that context, there are some things all attendees tend to have in common:

On Facebook you already can get great exposure for your event - let it be a music festival, a live gig, a concert, or just a more informal pop up stage - only by creating a Facebook event; news and updates can be shared in real time, and followers can be called for action, offering freebies or the chance of winning tickets for giving likes or sharing the page of the event.

However without any digital marketing action, you will be only reaching a very narrow audience, who found your page by accident or by already having interest in it.

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights designed to provide free statistics to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more. With Facebook Audience Insights you can take a quick assessment who would be most interested in your event, so you can adjust your targeting criteria consistently. You can use criterias e.g. people who are interested in pop/rock/jazz music, people who showed interest of a similar event or a competitor's event.

According to Audience Insights, people who are most interested in pop music and music events are from both gender, in between the age 25-34.

Audience Insights shows the Age/Gender statistics for event goers

Select your Facebook Audiences

In your Facebook Ad Manager create a new audience for your event on Facebook and use the built-in targeting criterias, such as geographics, demographics, interests, etc.

Depending on the type of event you want to advertise, you can pick and choose your relevant criterias.

There is no silver bullet here; you have to know your audience, and target accordingly. As mentioned above, event attendees can differ very significant depending on the type of event. Use your knowledge, and Facebook's extensive demographic and geographic options to start with the basics.

Creating new audiences for your adset in your Facebook Ads Manager

Demographic and Location-Based Targeting

The first set of targeting options for refining your target audience is basic demographics and geographics.

For example if you want to advertise a pop music event in San Francisco you might want to use the options “San Francisco +20km radius” for location, “25-34” for age and “All” for gender.

Interest-Based Targeting

To drill down even more, at the detailed targeting options you can select criteria like interest - these interests should align closely with the type of event you can run.

If you have certain artists performing at your event you can select people who liked their sites or for a broader selection choose people showing interest in pop music in general. Once you start to add interests, Facebook will suggest similar ones, and it will make your reach wider.

Detailed Targeting Options based on Interests in the Facebook Ads Manager

Behavior Targeting

With the removal of third party data from Facebook targeting options, it became almost impossible to make behavior based targeting so to see who purchased tickets for music events or festivals already in the past.

You can only find people who showed interest in events in general, however, it is highly vague what kind of events they were.

Detailed Targeting Options based on Past Behavior in the Facebook Ads Manager

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Custom Audiences

Finally, consider Facebook's Custom Audiences tool. Here, you can choose to target only recent visitors of your website, or lookalike audiences from your current customers or past event attendees. It's an advanced opportunity that takes time to learn, but can pay significant dividends once you do.

Innovative targeting with Audience Finder

Our Audience Finder is groundbreaking in the areas where conventional Facebook marketing falls short - find people who have specific apps installed, which is behavioural targeting at its best.

With a few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse, it is possible to find the people with the right apps installed that show that they have an active interest in music, events and buying tickets.

You have the option to target people based on one app or a combination of apps, and you can also combine it with traditional Facebook targeting filters for extra precision. With millions of app in our database, no user is out of reach.

First, define the apps your audience is most likely to have installed. It can be especially useful if you advertise your event on Eventbrite or Ticketmaster - so you can target people who have the app already installed.

Screenshot from the Audience Finder tool

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Combine it with Spotify and you have an audience who shows a high interest in music events.

Then, you are a click away from exporting your custom audience to your Facebook Ads account. A lookalike audience is also automatically created to broaden your reach. You can easily do that on our website: audience.42matters.com

All that remains is to use this new audience and lookalike in your campaign. You can even combine it with your traditional Facebook Ad filters such as demographics or other interests to reach your laser targeted audience.

Never forget to test

The most important part of your social media marketing, that cannot be emphasized enough, to always test which combination works best and which does not work at all. Keep experimenting with targeting criteria to see what audiences give you the best ROI.

Try the Audience Finder for Free!

Combine Audience Finder audiences with Facebook Ads to reach your business goals at better costs. You can use the Audience Finder for free with our 14-day trial and find how it can power-up your marketing efforts!

Audience Finder can provide audiences with a higher granularity and stronger intent. Ideally, combining both Facebook Targeting and Audience Finder’s results will give you a more effective ad targeting strategy that will place your ads directly in front of the right people.